My favorite city builder of 2022 just got a major update

This beautiful medieval city builder just added new buildings, markedly improved citizen AI, and a wagonload of other tweaks.

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It still feels a bit strange that Crate Entertainment followed up 2016 dark fantasy ARPG Grim Dawn with… a medieval city builder. But once you start playing Farthest Frontier, the wild shift in genres doesn’t seem that odd at all, especially since keeping your citizens alive and healthy through winter storms, raider invasions, bear attacks, and more communicable diseases than a medical journal can be brutally challenging.

Farthest Frontierentered Steam Early Access back in July, and quickly became my favorite city builder of the year with gorgeous looks, a deep farming system, and some vexingly clever bandits who kept robbing my town andscampering off with my gold. It’s received several patches since to address bugs and add some quality of life features, but version 0.8.0 arrived today and it’s a hefty one, packed with more meat than a medieval smokehouse.

First and foremost, the update has what everyone wants to see in a city builder: more stuff to build. There are a dozen new buildings in the update that provide new decorations and entertainment for your citizens. The festival pole provides an entertainment boost to the surrounding area so you don’t need to rely on a huge theater or pub to make your villagers happy. There are also new ornamental trees, flower urns, decorative fences, and extra plazas to build and upgrade, giving boosts to desirability and new ways to make your city look unique.

As far as more granular changes, you can now set minimum and maximum production limits for resources, meaning that if your workers produce enough of something they’ll step away from their specialty jobs and return to the general labor pool, which should help keep your town running much more efficiently.

Your settlers will also have better AI in general when it comes to working and transporting goods, “reducing frustrating instances of them stopping mid-task or dropping items all over town.” Huzzah! Villagers will also favor shelters close to their job sites instead of trekking all the way back home every evening, which is another cause for celebration when you’ve got them working on a mine far outside of town. When a fire breaks out, the entire population won’t run over to put it out anymore, leaving the closest villagers to do the job. As a result, most people will continue working on their tasks and you won’t wind up with 100 water buckets strewn around town afterwards. Again, huzzah.

Builders are smarter about their work, too: if different tasks like roads, walls, and upkeep take place at the same time, “builders will distribute themselves throughout these jobs until they are all completed.” Larger tasks like creating long roads or walls won’t be considered a single project anymore but multiple building tasks instead, meaning there’s less chance one lone worker will wind up doing the whole damn thing themselves.

Building repairs can also be prioritized, homes now have much more detailed desirability information, and additional tutorials and tooltips make understanding the various complicated systems of Farther Frontier easier. And there’s way more in the update, including better notifications, an improved terrain flattening tool (yay!), better cow behavior (they can now graze and poop on fields, though they’ll happily eat your crops if you’re not careful), and lots of tech improvements.

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You can see the full patch notes below, and get even more detail on the patch on theCrate Entertainment forums. Farthest Frontier update 0.8.0 is out now.

Major new features:

Art:

Tech:

AI:

Game:

Buildings:

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Combat:

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he’d stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He’s also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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